I Can’t Keep Up

“All the things,” is what the kids are saying these days, or so I’ve heard. Really, all of them? Like, everything? Do you know how many things there are?, I silently wonder to myself as I ponder the multitude of the universe.

This thing we call “the internet” has become the back wall in the cafeteria of my elementary school, where my friends and I would taking turns flicking macaroni and cheese (or whatever culinary delight was on the menu that day) against it and see whose would take the longest to slide down to the floor.

We never got caught.

Today, there are so many timelines and hashtags and trending topics and moments and notifications to keep us busy, but I just can’t do it. It all becomes white noise; a distraction like a fly that keeps buzzing in your ear.

More like a million of them.

Whenever I try to follow all the things more closely, let alone contribute anything to the “conversation,” I quickly become depressed and aggravated. Maybe because it’s not a conversation, but an eruption of information. Maybe because most of it is content being created for sole purpose of existing, to give people something to click on, so we can be tracked, categorized, and eventually monetized.

This isn’t living; at least not for me.

I want to create meaningful art, but are people willing to listen? It would take time, undivided attention, and eventually necessitate a response. How do you even initiate a genuine conversation in today’s world if no one is listening and no one cares? Or even if they do care, it’s only for a brief moment before the next shiny things takes their attention elsewhere.

I don’t know what to do about it, but I know I can’t keep up with this information overload. I have been holding onto the hope that things would die down and people would move on to something else, but it only seems to be getting worse over the years.

The ironic thing is, without posting a link to Facebook/Twitter/Whatever no one would even know it exists, let alone read it. So maybe being a part of all the things is a necessary evil, or maybe it’s possible to filter out the noise that I don’t care about.